TIME

Alwyn Wall sings a song ‘time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for you’.

Americans are obsessed with time. You can loose a friendship, or a job, by being 15 minutes late to a meeting. Time is important though. Most importantly in a time of need. People ask me why I do everything so urgently. 1. Because of my workload. If I don’t do something immediately, I won’t be able to get back to it. Wes Tomson, a used car wholesales once told me, If you want something done, give it to a busy man to do. 2. Suffering children. When they suffer, I suffer.

TIME flies. *the older your get the faster it goes* . Being that it is you might as well make it count for something. For me it is my relationship with God. Then my relationship with others. Popular ideas like ‘bucket lists’ make absolutely no sense to me. They are eternally erased the moment the lights go out.

The only thing that lasts is how you make other people feel about themselves, and of course, eternal life. I think the two are inter-twined.

I used to be a prison chaplain. One inmate found me years later, and told me that the BEST TIME OF HIS LIFE was sitting in my Bible class in the prison library, go figure! But, it made my day, in a dark moment of my life, so I have never forgotten that. People don’t remember what you tell them,, but they do remember that TIME that you made them feel good (or bad) about themselves, ESPECIALLY IN A TIME OF NEED. Jesus said, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me, I was naked and you clothed me. PRETTY BAD PLACES! Back then you had to walk for miles or days to visit someone. Nowadays you can FB, send a 2 second email or a one minute phone call, and sine Christians STILL don’t bother. Praise God many do.

When I was 13 me and some ADHD buddies hit a foul ball into the woods. We ended up going into the woods, never found the ball but built a campfire. We decided to sleep there… (It’s weird but my parents never seemed to mind if I disappeared for a couple of days. Well, as we were trying to sleep, we realized that school was going to start again in a few days. I hated school. Summer was almost over! So we got up and went to both the elementary school and high school and broke out all of the windows, to prevent school from opening. It seemed like a brilliant and heroic idea at the time. Well, we were laughing so loud that we woke up the neighbors to the school, and the next day we all got arrested. Man I felt bad. All my family was furious. Family friends, Aunts and Uncles came over to see my parents but practically spit on me. I was in a BAD place. Although I was in house arrest, I might as well had been in the worst prison in the world. And school was going to open on time anyway! All for not. Not a friend in the world,,, until my flower child Jesus Freak cousin Rebecca Winner came over with a bag of apples for me. She visited me in a dark moment, and made me FEEL a lot better. I have loved her deeply every since.

At our ministry we want the kids to associate the TIME they felt good about themselves with the TIME that they were learning about God. Good times and God times should be intertwined. Bad times we tend to forget and dismiss. WE tend to run from the times when we felt bad, and seek to relive the times we felt good.

God wants us to teach others to run to Him, not from Him. I believe that this is why He got so mad at Moses for HITTING the rock instead of speaking to it. Moses scared the people, they felt bad, and God was not happy. Moses misrepresented God. I think that that is why Jesus only yelled at the religious people. They misrepresented Him. They made God out to be mean and unloving when His entire make up is LOVE.

Time is short, our lives are but a vapor. We need to make every second count. Not frantically trying to do all the wild and crazy things we never done before *as the bucket list suggests*, but spending our valuable time on the things that count. As we spend time with our relationship with God, our relationship with others will improve. As we spend TIME making little kids with nothing else going on in their lives FEEL like they are having the TIME of their lives, our relationship with God will improve.

Our lives here are pretty mundane. But we ARE trying to make our little time that we have on this planet count for eternity.

Here is Maria Rosaria *Chayo*giving the kids the TIME of their lives. Time flies when you are having fun. WE had to rush because the fumigators were coming,, look at the pictures at the end of the album,,, I don’t think the fumigators kill only mosquitos!